Operational management

To setup TotalView for day-to-day VM management of environments, we had to connect our virtual environments to the TotalView interface. For each environment, (XenServer, VirtualCenter or plain-old ESX server), we had to enter our credentials. After that, TotalView imported all our virtual machines into its GUI and listed them for us. Then we were actually somewhat able to manipulate and control the hosts.

Our beef here is that there is no real-time data collection of what's happening in the VM farm. There are only snapshots of a single state rather than continuous monitoring or graphing of real time data.

We also need to point out that refreshing the GUI screen did always update the display after we had changed settings or performed a management task. For example, after changing the number of vCPUs allocated to a particular VM, the view showed the previous allocation until we closed the tab and re-opened it again.

User role management was lacking in comparison with the other products tested. There were different user profiles available to us, but no way to restrict what users could really do in terms of access and manipulating the managed VMs. We could only select the administrator role, which gives a user full rights to manage all machines in the virtual environments and use all administration settings (such as scheduling, creating new policies for alerts, adding new users or other admin tasks) or non-administrator roles (people who can manage the VMs but can't set any administration settings).